Will all of the ice on Greenland melt and flow out into the sea, bringing about a colossal rise in ocean levels on Earth, as the global temperature rises?

The key concern is how stable the ice cap actually is, and new Danish research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen can now show the evolution of the ice sheet 11,700 years back in time - all the way back to the start of our current warm period.

But now the Danish researcher Bo Vinther and colleagues from the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with researchers from Canada, France and Russia, have found an entirely new way of interpreting the information from the ice core drillings.

"Ice cores from different drillings show different climate histories. This could be because they were drilled at very different places on and near Greenland, but it could also be due to changes in the elevation of the ice sheet, because the elevation itself causes different temperatures" explains Bo Vinther about the theory.

Today the ice sheet is more than three kilometres thick at its highest point and thinning out towards the coast. Four of the drillings analysed are from the central ice sheet, while two of the drillings are from small ice caps outside of the ice sheet itself, at Renland on the east coast and Agassiz which lies just off of the northwest coast of Greenland in Canada.

"The ice is approximately 3 km thick in central Greenland and by analyzing every single annual layer in the kilometers-long ice cores researchers can get detailed information about the climate of the past. (Credit: Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen)"

Source: University of Copenhagen